Sunday, February 8, 2009

Over on Chris Shabsin's blog he posted his sci-fi reading list and I posted some comments (I've read just under half of his list, and I should harvest the remainder of). I thought I'd repeat some of those comments here and expand on them a bit.

Last year, I raved about Spin and thought Axis was pretty good, and this year I finally got around to reading some more Robert Charles Wilson. So far this year I've read Darwinia, Blind Lake, and The Harvest. None were as good as Spin, but all were good, and I especially liked Darwinia.

Other sci-fi authors I'd recommend:

Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five, in particular, but the latter is barely sci-fi)

Stanislaw Lem (Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress were favorites when I was a teenager)

Timothy Zahn (almost everything)

Larry Niven (I remain impressed with how well most of his work has aged)

Personal

Professional

I am a Engineering Director at Google. My team and I work on Search.

Previously, I was the CTO at an 802.11 location and security company, Newbury Networks in Boston. In June, 1999 I received my Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab. I graduated from MIT (undergraduate) in June, 1997, in physics. Prior to that I was CTO of net.Genesis from 1994 to 1996.